Story of the artist as a...Qatari

DOHA // Indian-born artist MF Husain has been seeking sanctuary for a long time. “Since my wife passed in 1996 I had no home,” Husain said during an interview at his West Bay villa in Doha.

Barefoot and wearing a loosefitting Arab kandoura, he tapped and twirled an oversized black paintbrush as a servant poured tea. “At this stage of my life, my mission is to work,” he said. “And I like to work in maximum peace and comfort.”

Realising these are two things he might never find in his homeland, Husain, 94, relinquished his Indian passport this week and accepted Qatari citizenship. With that, India lost a national treasure and Qatar gained a living legend.

“The arrival of a world-renowned artist like him, it will be a blessing for Qatar,” said SAM Bashir, an Indian businessman who has lived in Qatar for 20 years and is the former president of the Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre in Doha.

Husain’s paintings hang in museums from New York to Shanghai and controversy has mostly brightened his star. Today his works sell for up to US$2 million (Dh7.3m) at auction – as pricey as the work of any living non-western artist.

“But it is a national disgrace for India,” added Mr Bashir. “I don’t know why anyone from the Indian government didn’t make any attempt to solve the problem and bring him back to India. It’s a total failure of our democracy and secularism.”


Born in Pandharpur, near Bombay, in the fall of 1915, Maqbool Fida Husain had a rather progressive upbringing. “Nobody was religious, we were nationalist,” he said. “We were very secular right from the beginning.”

He began painting when he was six years old, and later attended art school. In 1947, the year India gained independence, Husain cofounded a progressive artists’ alliance.

He had a well-received solo show in Munich a few years later, followed by exhibitions in the United States and Europe. He moved into filmmaking, and his first film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, won the Golden Bear at the 1967 Berlin Film Festival.

The Indian government honoured him with top civilian awards in 1955, 1973 and 1991.

The trouble began just months before Husain’s wife died in 1996, when an Indian magazine published images of naked Hindu deities he had painted decades prior. With religious sensitivities running high in the wake of several communal clashes, Hindu nationalist groups responded angrily, filing lawsuits, burning effigies and threatening his life.

Husain left, bouncing between Europe and the Middle East for years. He spent a lot of time in Dubai. He visited Doha and struck up a friendship with the royal family, who bought dozens of his paintings for their new Museum of Islamic Art.

New works continued to spark controversy. In 2006 he painted India as a naked woman (Mother India). After the November 2008 terrorist assault on Mumbai, he depicted that woman being raped (The Rape of India), whipping right-wing Hindu groups into an anti-Husain lather. Returning home seemed out of the question.

Around this time, Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned learnt he was working on a series about Arab civilisation and offered to serve as his patron, promising housing, facilities and creature comforts.

“I wanted a sponsor, so I accepted,” said Husain.

More than 1,200 court cases have been filed against him in India, mainly for impugning religious and nationalist beliefs. Hindu extremists threaten to chop off his hands or gouge out his eyes if he returns.

Husain blames the government’s lack of response to the venom of Hindu nationalist groups such as the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena, which are linked to India’s leading opposition political party, the BJP.

“The government was weak, and it’s still weak,” he said. “The whole thing is political, it has nothing to do with art or religion – they only want to get some votes.”

The sacred and the profane have mingled in Hindu iconography for centuries. Examples include the erotic carvings at Khajuraho and certain engravings within the Ajanta and Ellora cave complexes not far from Husain’s birthplace.

Though he has not set foot in India for five years, the decision to renounce his Indian citizenship was not an easy one. “I still love my country,” said Husain, who is working on a series of paintings on Indian civilisation.

Like Sheikha Mozah, many Doha residents look forward to his future contributions to the Gulf.

“This is the first time a big Indian celebrity is taking a passport from the GCC, from an Arab country, so I think this is very good,” said PN Baburajan, an Indian property agent who has been living in Qatar for 25 years. He also works as a correspondent for a Malayalam TV news channel. “Now he loves Qatar and he’s going to do some work for Arab culture and civilisation.”

Earlier this week, several dozen large, completed works were scattered about Husain’s villa, clogging the hallways and leaning against the walls and furniture. Most had never been publicly exhibited. They included a sombre work called Palestine Blue and a large, disjointed painting entitled Yemen.

In addition to his thousands of paintings, Husain has six children, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Most of his family remains in India, where some observers see the artist’s decision as a defeat for free speech.

“A large body of people stood up and spoke for you in the confidence that you are with them in this struggle,” analyst Shazi Zaman wrote in open letter to Husain in the Calcutta Telegraph this week. “We thought that a person as privileged, as loved, liked and respected as you would certainly fight. But you took a flight out to Qatar.”

Sipping tea in his new home, Husain had a different perspective. “I am not a leader, I am a painter,” he said. “My job is to paint.”



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first appeared in 12 March The National, www.thenational.ae

These Jokers Are Serious

India's terror tally: 6 days. 58 bombs. 3 cities. 53 dead.

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Just before he kills his victims the villain of The Dark Knight, this summer's white hot Hollywood blockbuster, likes to ask them a question: "Why so serious?" The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, does not expect an answer. But as the victims realize the end is near, he relishes their rising fear – it suggests they hadn't been taking him seriously enough.

The terrorists who set off dozens of bombs in Bangalore and Ahmedebad last weekend and scattered handfuls more around the Gujarat port city of Surat seek a similar response. As with the Joker, the horrors have come rapid-fire, yet each has lingered longer than the last. Bangalore's eight blasts occurred over 15 minutes, killing 2. In Ahmedebad the 21 explosions took more than an hour, and have now killed 51. Surat residents discovered 21 slow-ticking bombs across the city over a period of nearly 30 hours.

A few of the Surat bombs were found in public garbage cans. One was placed behind a hoarding under a traffic flyover. Another had been secured in a low-hanging tree branch. Nobody knew where or when the next might appear, or whether it might reveal itself more rudely than the others. Was that part of the plan? Unsure whether the bombs were intended to explode, the police have theorized that they may have been a distraction, or a test to measure response times. Whatever the case, Surat may have been saved from physical damage but by all accounts the city is psychologically shattered.

Ahmedabad, too, has been scarred. Monday commuters leaped from a smoking city bus, later found to be suffering from an overheated engine. In the Ghodasar neighborhood an unclaimed tiffin prodded locals to call the police, whose investigations revealed the offending lunch case had been forgotten by a young boy. Residents have been phoning in false bomb alarms and mental health professionals in both cities report a spike in anxiety and stress disorders.

A Joker-like strategy of inciting fear is not the only cinematic homage hidden in this week's terror. The pattern of the Ahmedebad blasts closely follow the Bollywood film Contract, which arrived in local cinemas the previous week. In the movie a terrorist leader details his plan for a series of bomb blasts in Mumbai, followed an hour later with several blasts at city hospitals. The Ahmedebad bombs followed this very outline – with an extended first round of strikes followed by blasts at two major area hospitals, with the latter doing the lion's share of harm and ratcheting up the horror.

Dozens of analysts have outlined detailed policy proposals on the editorial pages of India's daily newspapers. Most cite the need for a unified central intelligence agency and various multi-pronged initiatives intended to redouble surveillance and security, increase Muslim development and foster community awareness.

Fine ideas all, but we should first grapple with what we are facing. These terrorists have three objectives: to incite widespread fear and make over a billion Indians ill at ease; to throw a wrench in India's widely lauded economic progress, its rise to superpower status; and finally, to sew religious enmity, particularly between Hindus and Muslims.

On the first score their success has been obvious and widespread. The fear has even reached Delhi, where the Japanese embassy was evacuated and shuttered Wednesday after receiving an anonymous bomb threat via email, and the southern state of Kerala, where a bomb-warning phone call panicked police.

On the second point the bad guys have made decent headway. Bangalore is a global IT hub. Ahmedabad is one of India's leading manufacturing centers. Surat operates one of the country's biggest and busiest ports. All three are now less attractive to local and international investors and businesses. Foreign trepidation has already risen its head; Japan recently warned its citizens about traveling in India. And in an email from Indian Muhajideen received minutes before the Ahmedabad blasts began, the attackers put leading businessman Mukesh Ambani and four major Muslim film stars in their crosshairs. These targets are well chosen; India's global profile has grown due in large part to its business dynasties – with the Ambanis, Tatas, and Birlas in the vanguard – and Bollywood celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan.

The third and most combustible objective has not yet come to pass, despite the seeming efforts of the opposition BJP. Party leaders have called the ruling UPA government "soft on terror," and a spokesperson said the problem "requires a Kashmir-type operation to tackle terrorism and root out the outfits supporting it." Strange choice of model, because India's war against a Pakistan-backed insurgency there has droned on for nearly two decades and resulted in some 50,000 dead. Further, this week the BJP urged residents of Jammu, the state's predominantly Hindu winter capital, to create a blockade in order to keep crucial goods such as meat, vegetables and dairy products from reaching the mostly Muslim Kashmir Valley. This in a region rife with long-simmering religious tensions.

The Dark Knight climaxes with the Joker's most insidious stunt. Two ferries – one full of criminals, the other full of law-abiding Gotham citizens – have been wired to explode. The Joker gives each boat a detonator for the bombs on the other boat, then gleefully announces to all passengers that if neither pushes their button for 30 minutes, both boats will blow. It's a moral dilemma, a deadly game of chicken, and Gothamites find it in themselves to stay calm and embrace life.

Can India do the same, or will its impressive progress be stalled by fear and communal rage? A good question, and just cause to get serious.

-- published in Aug 4 Tehelka, an Indian newsweekly.